SIDE ORDER OF FRIES - CHAPTER SIX

SIX

The Crime Scene Techs were an ornery bunch; they came speed walking onto the scene, large make-up-type cases in their hands that seemed to cause the smaller of them to list to the side. All of theme were glowering, as if burdened by the fact that they were so rudely taken away from their Sunday morning activities. A group of two entered the diner (after putting booties over the rubbers which encased their soiled shoes) while a group of three stayed behind in the parking lot. They took photographs, notes, plaster impressions of the tire tracks, and bagged all kinds of evidence which Exitus could not have seen with an electron microscope. All the while, they grumbled over the state of college basketball and how the state school had failed to make it to the finals—again. They spoke of those “vampires on Wall Street and the idiots on Main Street who single handedly created the recession mess the country was in for buying houses they knew they couldn’t afford; don’t people have brains anymore and why aren’t the citizens of this great country of ours put through rigorous IQ tests before buying so much as cheese in the grocery store?” To which the tiny blonde woman (the one who was bent like ivy toward the sun from that heavy case of hers) shrugged her shoulders and sprayed some kind of plaster or paint into a hole in the mud.

The third party member, not one for talk of politics, took it upon himself to shake down Exitus.

Because he had entered the diner, would it be all right if the team took a few snapshots of the bottom of his shoes—you know, for protocol? As if Exitus Quick had already been tried and convicted of the crime without any due process or even a change of pants, which had hardened into a chaffing nightmare. He could barely move without the mud-laden legs rubbing his skin and twisting the denim around his thighs, and now they wanted him to lift his legs so they could take pictures of his shoes?

Officer Cassidy, who had not moved from Exitus’s side, screwed his face into an expression that would have terrified even Pinhead. In fact, Exitus would rather have been off on a play date with the Lead Cenobite, the Black Pope of Hell, the Angel of Suffering, the Dark Prince of Pain (the rather disturbing object of Agatha Freeland’s affection, Exitus’s unrequited love all through high school), the once-human Captain Elliot Spencer turned sadist from Hades in the Hellraiser movies—than in the parking lot of Lidia’s Diner, surrounded by angry crime scene techs and a police officer better suited to the Strong Man tent of a freak show.

Exitus had to perform a strange dance whilst lifting his leg and leaning against the hearse, but he managed to stay upright long enough for the crime scene tech to take photos of his shoes.

Then came more questioning. By the time Exitus had recited his story enough times to satisfy Officer Cassidy, he felt as though all of his internal organs had been sucked out through a straw. But that wasn’t the worst thing. The worst thing, the thing that made him want to run off to an Indian market and buy a cursed puzzle box and raise Hell (ask Pinhead what was so appealing about him that made a girl like Agatha Freeland pull the psycho card and worship him), the thing that made Exitus want to crawl into a hole and die—arrived not long after Exitus came close to face planting in the mud after losing his balance from hopping around on one leg.

There was a screech of tires out on the road, far enough away from the diner to not send up smoke but close enough to still be deafening, and Exitus shrank a little bit lower into himself. The media had come, or so he assumed; however, the media tended not to scream:

“Get out of my way, Harold! This is my diner and if you don’t let me through you’re going to be pissing through you nose. Do you understand me?”

Officer Cassidy actually flinched. More than that. It was like watching a jell-o mold of a man quiver after being flicked by Sasquatch.

Exitus turned to see a large red-haired woman walk toward Officer Cassidy, being escorted by a mouing crime scene tech. She was followed by the atrocious girl named Becca he had met yesterday and a brunette man with a face of granite but the swagger of Donald Duck.

“What the Hell is going on here?” the red-haired woman asked, although her shrill tone of voice made everything she said sound like a statement; Exitus could only guess when it came to punctuation. “I’ve got a person lying dead in my diner and another one missing and some strange kid hanging out in my parking lot and no one thinks to call me directly? Emmy Jackson’s the one who told me. She nearly drove right into my screen door, the hapless girl, and here you people are standing around? What the fuck is going on?”

Becca was past the point of sobbing. Her eyes were red, her face swollen and her clothes thrown on in a blind hurry; she looked like Death after an allergic reaction to happiness. She was clutching her stomach through the tent-like fabric of her sweatshirt (no doubt Adam’s) and looked ready to vomit. Exitus was quite sure that the pouting crime scene tech beside her was more than ready to whip out the barf bag he might have stored in his back pocket.

The brunette man, the walking contradiction of silliness and seriousness, looked even worse than Becca. His eyes had a vacant sheen to them, while his skin was paler than that of a goth chick Exitus had seen once who’d tattooed her entire body white (which looked nice right up until the moment the ink turned pink because the girl hadn’t thought to research white ink and how her body might tolerate it). Anyway, the guy looked bad. He was sweating and his lips were cracked, as if he had done all the vomiting for Becca before arriving at the diner.

Then, of course, there was the screaming red-haired woman (who had not shut her mouth yet, leaving Officer Cassidy to stand and quiver and pray to God for a sinkhole to form below him and swallow him whole). She was none other than Lidia, Becca’s mother and owner of the fine eatery with its floors now being washed with blood. Unlike the two kids in her troupe, she looked perfectly fine (albeit a little peeved). A tall woman of healthy frame, Lidia had a face that could have been plastered onto Russian Mafia recruitment posters. Her eyes were a hard golden color squeezed into sharp points as she berated Officer Cassidy (shot vulgarities in Exitus’s general direction) and gesticulated with her surprisingly strong-looking hands while doing so. In short, she was one terrifying woman and Exitus felt utterly ridiculous for ever being afraid of Laka, the plastic hula girl looking out at the day’s events from her position on the hearse’s dashboard.

“So,” she continued on in her only-dogs-may-hear-it octave range, “why haven’t you carted this fat sonuvabitch off to jail yet?”

Exitus blinked, affronted. He was not fat. Sure, he didn’t have a surfer’s 32-inch waisted body—but he definitely wasn’t fat. Lidia wasn’t exactly slim….

Officer Cassidy remained in silence, his mouth agape, and waited for Lidia to keep motoring along. She didn’t. She stood with her hands on her hips, a toe rapping the mud.

“Be—because, uh.” Cassidy cleared his throat. “Because there isn’t any proof he’s done anything, Lidia.”

“That’s bullshit and you know it, Adrian! Just look at him. He’s a heathen!”

Exitus shoved his hands into the pouch of his sweatshirt, fingered the bar of soap he had yet to use and hoped he didn’t smell all that badly.

Officer Cassidy sighed. Becca stared ahead, comatose. The unnamed brunette bit his lip. The unhappy crime scene tech had gone.

“Lidia,” Cassidy began. “One of your employees has just been killed. Mary is missing. Don’t you think there are more... well, productive things to do in this situation instead of impeding the investigation?”

Those pointed eyes threw daggers. “‘Impeding the investigation’? God, Adrian, you were just as obtuse when we were married! How’d you make it through the police academy, being this stupid?” That last word was in such a high pitch that it was nothing but a sharp ringing, so Exitus could only snatch at what she might have truly said. He imagined it to be clean.

Lidia’s ex-husband turned to the crime scene tech who had reappeared beside Becca. “Have you got everything you need from Mr. Quick here?”

There was a delighted grin on the man’s face. He must have been enjoying the show. “Yes. But we’ll need to keep the hearse. I’ve got Shamus calling ahead for the warrant.”

Officer Cassidy nodded, then addressed Exitus. “You may go—but don’t leave town.”

“How can I, sir?”

The Strong Man smiled. “There’s a motel in town. I’ll have one of the officers take you there.”

Exitus shifted uncomfortably. “I don’t really have any money, sir.”

That was met with a frown from Cassidy and a tut from Lidia. “Noelle owes me a favor,” he said. “I’ll just have to call it in a little early.”

Genevieve sat peacefully in the early morning sun, her chrome shining and black paint glowing in the orange light. Exitus gave her a pat. “Can I take some clothes?Practically everything I own is in there.”

“He lives in that thing?” Lidia screeched. “He’s homeless. Isn’t that illegal?”

Officer Cassidy had a hand on his gun, possibly weighing the options of shooting his darling ex-wife. To Exitus he said: “I’m sorry, but you’re the only suspect we’ve got right now. You don’t have a lot of breathing room.”

At least the man was honest. But was all of what was going on here following legal protocol?

“There’s a second hand store in town as well as the motel. I’ll have Darla put your things on a tab.”

How wonderful. Aunt Lily was going to have a heart attack when she found out about this.

Oh, dear Lord.

He was going to have to call Aunt Lily.

SIDE ORDER OF FRIES - CHAPTER FIVE

FIVE

Wronki. Exitus was standing beside Genevieve, parked in the muddy lot of Lidia’s Diner, which was located on the outskirts of Wronki, Wisconsin. He knew this because the car pulling to the curb of the back road had the words “WRONKI POLICE” printed on the side.

It parked in front of the driveway, lights rotating silently. For what seemed like ten minutes nothing happened. The lights went round and round, no one was purged from the vehicle and nothing happened. It took so long for something to happen, in fact, that Exitus was able to go over what had gone on numerous times—and he still couldn’t make sense of it.

He got out of the hearse and slogged through the mud, grumbling over his shoes and still grumbling he ascended the diner’s stairs. So, hearse—mud—stairs. Okay, not hard to understand. But then the door came, that menacingly innocent door holding such nightmares behind it. Crime show nightmares. With blood and body and—

Exitus shook his head. Better to relive the walking. The vomiting even. He ran his tongue across his teeth, battery acid still thick in his mouth. The taste was nauseating and Exitus could only hope he wouldn’t lose his stomach in front of the local law enforcement.

As the fuzz finally exited the car (two of them: Bonnie and Clyde done good) Exitus burped a rancid bubble of acid which burned away his esophagus. Swallowing was painful and he winced as the police marched over to him. As Exitus watched them advance toward him, he noticed that they were staring hard at the ground. They were walking in a tight line and stepping in areas of mud clear of tire tracks, footprints not their own.

So small-town police weren’t all backward hicks after all.

With the grace of a ballerina, the larger of the officers progressed slowly to the crime scene. He looked like a major league catcher: huge thighs, barrel chest, broad shoulders and the arms of a steroid-riddled gorilla. He had the reddened, puckered face of a man consuming pickled eggs doused in tequila.

A wispy, doe-eyed kid played the part of the sidekick. Exitus noticed with slight embarrassment that this officer was in fact a he and not a she. The womanly thin man walked as though he hadn’t quite gotten a hold of moving through thick mud whilst wearing an equipment belt. He tripped along as he cordoned off the front of the parking lot with crime scene tape.

“Son?”

Exitus felt the blood drain from his face; he had never so much as gotten a detention in his twelve years of schooling and now he found himself being addressed by a man of the law. He opened his mouth to speak, watched as a moth flew out to play with the morning.

The human gorilla creaked his way in front of Exitus, his hand on his gun. Exitus saw this and squeaked.

“It’s all right, son.” He stood before the boy named death and stared hard at him through his puckered face.

Exitus blinked. All right? All right? He shook his head. This was most certainly not all right. Not all right at all. He watched as the man-who-looked-more-like-a-woman finished with the tape and began to look around, study the mud. In his hands was a leather-skinned pad he must had taken out of a pocket when Exitus had been preoccupied with the giant in front of him. Bonnie/Donnie proceeded to take studious notes as he marveled over the tracks in the mud. He might also have made notes about the debris in the parking lot, had there been any.

“Your call was quite frantic….” The elder officer trailed off, his attention caught by Genevieve.

Not moving his gaze away from the notetaker, Exitus began to tap the middle finger of his right hand against his thumb. “Of course it was frantic. I stumbled across a murder scene, how could I not be fanatical about it?”

The officer (Cassidy proclaimed his tag) looked back to Exitus as he pointed to the hearse. “This your—” he cleared his throat “—vehicle, eh?”

Nodding, Exitus turned to look at the inhumanly large officer. “Yes, sir.”

“Interesting mode of transport.”

“I like it.”

The younger officer was now at the foot of the diner’s stairs. He closed his notepad and shoved it back in one of the pockets of his utility belt. After scraping off his shoes, the young gun used his baton to open the door Exitus had not closed completely in his rush to leave and evacuate the contents of his stomach. Carefully, Bonne/Donnie slipped inside the diner.

Cassidy’s puckered face became severe. “I don’t know your face, son, and I know everyone’s face.”

Exitus felt as though the blood in his veins had been replaced with turpentine. He was the poster boy for UNCOMFORTABLE. “I just arrived here yesterday, sir.”

“Yesterday.”

“I slept here, sir.”

Taking out his own notebook, Cassidy began to jot down words in chicken scratch. “What’s your name, son?”

“E—Tod Quick.”

“Todd.”

He leaned forward to see his name, his tapping finger moving at record speed. “One D, sir.” Call him naive, but he’d always assumed that people would know how to spell his name (in his travels he had noticed that a lot of men spelt their name T-O-D—probably inciting laughing riots in the German-speaking world).

“One D.”

“Yes, sir. But I go by Exitus.”

The officer frowned, pulling his pinched face down and taut. “Exitus?”

“Yes,” he replied, nodding. “E-X-I-T-U-S.”

Cassidy shifted his monstrous shoulders. “Are you high?”

“What? No. No, sir, I’m not high.”

“Drunk, then?”

Exitus vehemently shook his head. “It’s not wise to drive a three-ton vehicle while inebriated, sir.”

“Huh.” The mammoth officer jabbed his pen at Genevieve. “Your name is Tod-With-One-D ‘Exitus’ Quick and you slept in that thing overnight. Through a murder which you just so happened to come across this morning.”

“Wish I hadn’t.”

“Called it in?”

Exitus waved a hand at the dripping rhododendrons. “Come across it.”

The young officer with the strained gait and womanly lines tumbled out of the diner, a handkerchief over his face and a musical dry heaving penetrating the square of cotton. Apparently, Bonnie/Donnie was not only unaccustomed to an equipment belt but murder scenes as well. He burped-coughed-mewled his way to the party of two beside the hearse.

“What’s the story, Rory?” Officer Cassidy asked, looking away from the weird kid he’d been questioning.

The patch sewn into Bonnie/Donnie’s navy shirt branded him with the name of Vadkowitz. “It’s pretty bad in there,” he gurgled, the handkerchief shoved back into a spare pocket but the disgust still apparent.

Officer Cassidy jerked a thumb at Exitus. “I gathered as much from Tod-With-One-D over here.”

Vadkowitz fiddled nervously with his holster, igniting a comedic image in Exitus’s mind of a bumbling cop accidentally aggravating the gun’s hair-trigger temper. “It’s Adam Monaco in there… all over in there.”

The elder policeman grew a waxy shade of pale.

“Did him in with Harold,” Vadkowitz explained, and didn’t Exitus just know that cow was evil? “He probably died after the first blow. All the others were superfluous.”

Waxy pale transcended to a brilliant translucency. “The others?”

Vadkowitz nodded. “Split Harold right in half.”

Exitus didn’t know much about law enforcement procedures, but he was fairly certain that the information Vadkowitz was relinquishing in front of him was rather sensitive.

“The money’s gone, too. As is Mary.”

Cassidy nodded sickly. “Call for backup. And put out an APB on Mary, just in case.”

Vadkowitz charged to the patrol car in an all out sprint, his awkwardness vanished and replaced with shock and disbelief. Because the Dead Fall air—and suddenly that tern seemed mildly inappropriate—was so thin Vadkowitz’s voice carried easily across the parking lot. However, Exitus wasn’t able to hear it.

Cassidy spoke loudly over the frantic voice of his partner. “To reiterate, Mr. Quick?”

Mr. Quick leaned again the hearse, his palm pressing heavily into Genevieve’s waxed flesh for support. He had broken out in a cold sweat, his knees weak and his mind burdened with an acute difficulty separating dream from reality, past from present.

Exitus was Toddy Toad once more, standing on the RV steps with the door wide open and his miserable cold forgotten. The lollipop had slipped from both his mouth and his finger, kissed the pavement with a decisive crack.

His parents splayed across the road like two dancers attempting the Rumba in a prone position... covered in—

“Tod? Tod Quick? Son, are you all right?”

He blinked to find himself sitting on the ground, his legs folded uncomfortably beneath him. His left hand was still reaching out for Genevieve, as if she were a flotation device and Exitus trapped in the middle of a stormy sea.

Officer Cassidy bent down to help Exitus to his feet. Although suspicious of the vagrant, he was nevertheless concerned for this possible witness’s health. “ I asked: Are you all right?”

“I’m breathing,” Exitus responded in his usual manner when faced with such a question, a question Aunt Lily knew enough to never ask (unless she was frazzled, having waited a good eon for her nephew to pick up the phone). “I’m breathing,” he repeated, “so I guess, in the vast scheme of things, I am all right.”

Cassidy frowned, but not in response to Exitus’s health report. A high-pitched ringing was cutting through the morning, a dual chorus of ding!s that Exitus might have imaged if not for the officer’s blatant use of profanity. The red-faced monolith turned to look at the road.

“Sweet mother of…. I thought I told that girl to get rid of the police scanner.”

Confused, mind bogged down with death, Exitus swiveled his head toward the noise.

Riding across the grass and into the mud puddle that was the Lidia’s Diner parking lot, nestled onto a beaten old bicycle, was the object of Officer Cassidy’s frustration.

The woman came to a stop beside the hearse, eying it with a dubious wonder. When she had shaken off the awe, she dismounted the bike and fetched a small notebook from the large basket attached to the handlebars.

“Emery Jackson,” the gorilla-like officer said gruffly. “What brings you here?”

“Murder most foul,” the woman responded with a flourish, if such things were possible and with her, with skin the color of spun molasses, Exitus did not doubt that she could even cut a steak using the cadence of her voice alone.

Officer Cassidy brought a hand to his brow. “Really, now Emery, I wish you wouldn’t do this.”

“And I wish you’d start calling me Emmy like everyone else does, but I guess that’s not happening either.” She looked again at the hearse and then to Exitus, covered in mud from the knees down. She looked slightly puzzled. “You’re not Jake.”

Exitus shrank away from the woman’s intense stare. Back went his index finger to tap rapidly his thumb.

“He’s not a corner,” Officer Cassidy explained. “Just drives that hearse around for fun.”

Emery Jackson opened her notebook and, with a pen pulled from the spiral binding, began to jot down notes. “He the killer? How many bodies? Any apparent motive?”

Again, Officer Cassidy rubbed at his brow. “I’m not disclosing any information at this time.”

Emery Jackson frowned, drummed her pen against the face of her notebook. “This is huge,” she said. “With a story like this I might finally get out of the recipe section.”

The mud on Exitus’s lower half was quite cold. It was hardening into a cumbersome cement and he would have really enjoyed a change of wardrobe.

“—pity you, honestly I do. However, this is not a vehicle for career advancement.”

“A time-frame then?”

“I can’t give out any information at this time. You might as well go home.”

Emery looked as stubborn as a mule, as indefatigable as a barnacle, as beautiful as a swan (and possibly just as vicious). Turning on her heel, she pointed her notebook at Exitus. “What about you?”

“Drifter,” Cassidy explained dryly.

Pen flew across paper, circled and underlined. “Name?”

“No name, poor kid. Born without a tongue and doesn’t even have working arms to sign with.”

“Cassidy—”

“Now you look here, Emery. We’ve got a hell of a scene going on here which you’re trampling all over. We might need whatever impressions there are in this mud, but unfortunately you just took one out with your bike. I need you to go back home and wait for Sheriff Hardell’s news conference. If you want to pester us then you’re more than welcome.”

Maybe Exitus had been a little hasty in calling Emery Jackson indefatigable, for she wilted under the harsh light of the officer’s words.

“Pestering? Pestering? Hey, I’m only doing my job.”

“Your job, Miss Jackson, is to find a page’s worth of recipes before the Wednesday edition goes to print.”

The drying mud on Exitus’s legs was no longer hideously awkward.

Emery managed to both wilt further and bristle like a deneedled porcupine. The girl was truly amazing.

Faintly, in the distance, came the sound of a swarm of police sirens.

Officer Cassidy sighed. “Please, Emery. This is no place for you.”

“I’m not going anywhere. Someone has to break this story.”

“Yes, and it’ll be the hoard of television news cameras hurdling here from all directions. It’ll be the vultures who won’t be able to contain themselves on the other side of the crime scene tape, who won’t be able to wait to break the news that a gruesome murder has just played out in the Town Where Nothing Ever Happens. There’s your headline. You have a head start on them, now go.”

For the first time since arriving at the scene, Emery looked to the Airstream. Wheels and cogs turned audibly.

“I have a lot of work to do here, Emery. Please.”

Her mouth moved, but for a moment only silence passed through full lips. Then: “It wasn’t a customer, was it?”

“There’s a reason why you’re stuck in the cooking section, Emery.”

Bright eyes dulled. Exitus knew such because Emery Jackson returned her attention to him. “Who are you?”

The din of the sirens was at a fever pitch now. Officer Cassidy yelled, but it was doubtful that he did so to be heard over the wailing of backup. “Emery Rose if you don’t get to stepping right now—”

“Just tell me who it is. I’m going to find out eventually, anyway.”

“Adam. It’s Adam in there and if you don’t leave this instant you will be the one to tell Judy personally that her son is dead!”

Emery backed away, her arms pinwheeling in such a manner one would think she’d been forcefully shoved by the massive bulk that was Officer Cassidy. She threw her notebook into the basket on her bike, mounted the rusting hunk of metal, and pedaled out of the parking lot (mindful to follow the path she had taken in) as fast as the mud would allow.

“As for you,” Officer Cassidy spat at Exitus (and, really, he did spit).

He threw up his palms, stupefied by all the people in crisp uniforms exiting their cars and swarming around the bony structure of Officer Vadkowitz. The many people, the rotating lights, reminded him so much of his parents, and he wanted desperately to be back home with Aunt Lily.

“Start your story again, from the top.”

SIDE ORDER OF FRIES - CHAPTER FOUR

FOUR

On the rare occasions when Exitus dreamed, he recalled very little of them after waking. In the rawest of effects, the dreams raped his mind; he woke only to the feeling of being violated. A few nightmarish images clung to him like a ravenous beast from a Stephen King novel, black talons thrust deep within Exitus’s skin.

The beast, of course, was not something borne of fantasy but of mEmery and in these mEmery dreams he was perpetually eight years old, his head stuffed with cotton and his nose a faucet opened to full power. Always in these “dreams” he was in the RV. The smell of citrus cleaner hung heavy in the air. Though his nose was filled with mucus, he knew it was there. His mother was always cleaning, maybe because in an RV there wasn’t much else to do. She was fond of orange-scented cleaners, the kind likened to a vexed medieval torturer on grime but, a fluffy bunny rabbit to children and the environment. But she wasn’t cleaning in these mEmery dreams.

In the “dreams” little Tod always woke with a cold, coughing his raw throat more raw and groaning in his bed above the RV’s cockpit. Because Dad was perpetually driving, Mom was the one who eternally came to the rescue. She climbed up to her suffering son and felt his heavy forehead, and frowned.

“Toddy Toad,” she said through that frown. “This won’t do at all.”

She pulled down his smoldering comforter and folded it neatly at his feet. Baseball bats and crisp white leather balls disappeared into a sea of navy blue cotton and polyfill. Tod stared down at his feet—twin peaks jutting from the red cotton flat sheet—and lazily wriggled his toes. The movement made him ill, so he stopped and looked to the RV’s wall at his right.

“Do you want some orange juice, honey?”

Tod nodded, the clogged sinuses in his cement-filled head clicking.

Mom kissed his sweaty brow, gently ruffled his hair. “Extra chunky, how’s that sound?”

“Gud,” he replied, his voice emanating from the bottom of a well. He wiped his nose with his arm. The hairs tickled his nose and caused him to sneeze.

Down the ladder and in three large strides Mom was at the refrigerator. She opened the tiny door and pulled out Tod’s juice—and it truly was his, for his name was scrawled across all sides of the carton in black marker.

“Jeffery, we’ve got a sick one back here!” she called, getting a Fraggle Rock thermos from the cupboard.

“Uh-oh!” Dad replied to a bout of Tod’s coughing. “Get my hook from the bedroom. I think we’re going to have to string the boy up—cut a drainage hole in his head.”

“Not on my floors we’re not!”

Mom readied the thermos and set the orange juice back into the fridge, then proceeded to gather provisions: a plastic bag from the holder by the locked front door, a box of tissues from the dinette and back up to her son. He took the juice from her and laced his hand through the handle. The whole family used thermoses; on a moving-shaking-bouncing RV, they were simply easier to hold onto and if they ever did fall the spilling was minimal.

Tod coughed again, the phlegm in his chest feeling like a massive network of honeycomb. The Fraggles undulated in his unsteady hand. When the spell passed, Tod wheezed and looked to Mom. “You really wouldn’t string me up like a fish… would you?”

“Of course not,” Mom said as she set the tissues by Tod’s head. She tied the plastic bag to the ladder. “Toddy Toad goo everywhere? We’d never be rid of the smell.”

“We’d use a bucket! Easy clean-up, just toss it all out the door.”

Tod stared down at his thermos, bright orange tapioca sloshing around inside. He took a deep swig and chewed, setting down the thermos on his bedside shelf.

“Don’t pay any mind to your father, dear, he’s facinorous.”

“Fass—” Tod began to question, but coughed instead. The coughing quickly led him to blow his nose, sounding like an elephant. Unfortunately the mucus did not recede in his head; it grew, like a bad Disney song that just wouldn’t go away.

Mom frowned and climbed down the ladder. She went to the candy cupboard over the sink and took out a small bag of kiddie lollipops—the kind with the safety loop at the base—and brought them to Tod. “Fass-in-or-us. It means atrociously wicked. Say it again, sear the word into your mucousy brain.”

He smiled at what his brain might look like: green and gelatinous and globular, sliding around in his head and leaking mold-colored sludge out his nose.

Tubular.

“Facinorous,” he recited slowly, then once again, faster. He sat up a little more on his mattress, head pounding, and reached for his thermos. He chewed another mouthful of juice, the pulp like a thousand tiny bugs between his teeth, baby termites perhaps. Given enough time, those baby termites would grow and eat miles of scrupulous tunnels through his organs. How even more tubular. If only Mom would let him swallow termites.

“Very good,” she praised. “Now, it’s time for fulvous fulsome fellows to become fainéant.”

Mom had a bad habit of doing that: using big words Tod didn’t understand. He assumed it was the result of the RVing lifestyle; in addition to cleaning, she read the unabridged dictionary.

“Today is sponsored by the letter F!” Dad exclaimed from his captain’s chair. “How many things do you see that begin with the letter F?”

Mom patted Tod between the shoulders as he began to think, blowing his nose for good measure.

Feet, flowers, fingers, Fraggles. Feathers, fowl, Formica, fridge.

“I want a total by supper, Tod. Let’s see if you can beat me. Why, look—a Ferrari! Driven by a ferret in a fedora no less. Twitchin’.”

“Nu-uh, Dad.”

“Swear to Buddah, my real gone cat.”

Tod frowned deeply. “Rodents can’t drive.”

“Don’t be such a fink, daddy-o.”

“Yeah, well….” Tod looked to Mom, unable to come up with a good comeback in the slang of his father’s generation.

Mom leaned forward and whispered something into Tod’s ear. He giggled.

“At least I’m not thicker than a $5 malt!”

“Heavy.”

Mom laughed. “Meanwhile, back at the ranch….” She plunked a light fist on Tod’s arm and started down the ladder.

“Okay, Dad. You’re on.”

With Mom gone again, Tod continued to think through his cold-stuffed head. Every day was sponsored by a letter, revealed by Mom’s silly triplets and declared by Dad. It was then a game, a race to see who was more observant and knowledgeable with words. Mom never played, thankfully, but acted as the referee, who returned in the middle of Tod’s list—flour, fur, fossils—with a portable television and a nigh empty box of Benadryl.

She set the television in the far corner of Tod’s loft. With a pop! and the appearance of a wavy, growing rectangle of picture, the mini TV came to life. A quick search through the stations brought them to VH1—and some guy in a polo shirt and mullet singing about how everybody wants to rule the world. How that correlated to a couple of dudes in fancy suits dancing in front of gas pumps….

Mom gave him the last dose of Benadryl and settled him under the covers. She kissed his forehead for the umpteenth time. He really wished she wouldn’t to that.

Tucked into the sheets like a pill bug, Tod sunk his head into the pillow. He yanked a fistful of tissues from the box and sneezed, the drippings from his nose sludgy and sticky.

“My poor Toddy Toad,” Mom lamented as she situated the safety suckers within easy reach. “If you need anything, we’re right below you.”

Tod nodded and snuggled deeper beneath the sheets.

His mind went after that.

He registered Mom leaving to join Dad at the helm, the commercials on VH1 and some more music. An angry lady named Pat Benatar addressed a lousy heart breaker, dream maker, love taker—don’t you mess around with her. Then sometime during a song by a redundant Mr. Mister whining about his broken wings, drowsiness crashed down upon him. His head was fuzzy and his eyelids suddenly were made of stone.

When Tod finally woke it was to the night, VH1 still on (though muted) in efforts to keep the dark at bay. The Fraggle Rock thermos was gone, replaced by a piece of folded card stock baring Dad’s block printing.

“IN CASE YOU WAKE BEFORE WE GET BACK, WE’VE GONE ACROSS THE STREET FOR SUPPLIES.” Almost as if an afterthought: “HOW’RE YOU DOING ON YOUR LIST, KIDDO?”

Kiddo sat up in bed. His head was a boulder on his shoulders, but at least his nose had dried up. His throat, however, was on fire. The bag of suckers was still sitting beside him, so he took one and threw the wrapper in the plastic bag hanging from the ladder.

As he sucked on a hard disc of grape, Tod looked about the RV—which was parked. Where he didn’t know, but it was parked. There was a cacophony of cars and people seeping through the walls, though, and Tod’s amazing powers of deduction revealed that they were parked in a city. He rolled over across his bed and looked down into the kitchen, those city lights so bright it looked like day down there.

The kitchen walls were tattooed with ethereal discs of light, broken by the blinds, which grew larger and larger until a car came too close to the RV to throw its light up through the high windows. Their menacing shapes hummed by, wraiths in the night.

Through the windows, past the cars, Tod saw the brightly lit curb of a supermarket or gas station—whatever it was the RV was parked in front of. He rested his elbows on the top rung of the ladder, shoulders thrust into space, and watched the cars pass by and listened to the ceaseless drone of city-life. Suck-slurp-suck-clack went the sucker.

Tod didn’t like cities. He much preferred the back woods of civilization: the ghost towns, the silly roadside attractions, the stone monuments and the massive national parks. He liked to sit at the edge of the lake in his kid-sized travel chair, fishing pole in hand and the lure bobbing up and down in the water. He liked the fritinancy, the noise of insects, and the call of birds. He liked the sharp sound of campers’ boots against gravel or the slushy, slippery sound of those boots against wet grass. The soaring operatic melodies of moose and wolves and elk and other woodland beasts filled Tod with a searing wonder and paralyzing awe—but the sound of cars and buses and trucks rushing past the RV, the noise of it all, grated against Tod.

His head was pounding, hanging over the loft like it was, the blood vessels in his eyes and the aggravated sinuses in his nose pulsing feverently. With a sigh, Tod twisted himself around (carefully so as not to choke to death on a safety sucker: that would be “ironic” as his mother would say) and slid down the ladder almost like a fireman down a pole—hands and pajama-footed feet on the beams for maximum velocity.

Tod hit the ground and woozily backed away into the kitchen. He walked over to the sink and looked out the window. The imposing structure of a major pharmaceutical chain staring back at him from across the street. Though it was late into the evening (or early into the morning), there were still enough cars in the parking lot to prohibit the Titanic of the Highway entry.

Mom and Dad weren’t in the parking lot, not that Tod looked hard enough for them. He didn’t come down the ladder to look out the window, but to “book it to the KYBO and take a whiz” as Dad would say. Tod rapped his knuckles against the metal sink, the cold refreshing to his warm skin, and jogged off toward his appointment.

Halfway to the KYBO a woman screamed. The scream superimposed itself onto another sound: the roar of two heavy things fwunk! fwunk!-ing against something metallic and hollow.

Tires tore into pavement and squealed off into the night, charging through the past and into the present—attacking the hearse’s walls and violently assaulting the night.

Exitus woke as he typically did after such “dreams”: sweating and disoriented. He didn’t know where he was, who he was. For several fleeting moments he was still Toddy Toad—dazed and confused and wondering where his sucker had gone off to, why he wasn’t wandering out into the street staring at his bloodied parents, Mom still holding onto a shopping bag exanguinating cough drops and Benadryl. Wondering why he was instead lying in the back of a hearse sixteen years older and one hundred pounds heavier.

Then it came seeping back like flood waters through the walls of a stone cellar.

He wasn’t Toddy Toad but a kid with the moniker of Exitus traveling the country in Uncle Monty’s hearse. He had left home not so long ago with the dream of becoming the American Michael Palin—paid to travel the world and shoot documentaries. But currently he was parked in the lot of Lidia’s Diner in a town in Wisconsin with a name too unimportant to remember.

Exitus tossed the blankets away and rolled out of the makeshift bed, sat on the floor and stared at the crimson drapes.

“For a minute there, I lost myself”, as a man named Thom Yorke (a man with a head presumably made of radios) once sang to a group of Karma Police. And indeed, Exitus had lost himself for a minute there but, that was over now—now he was the dumpy Exitus Quick with a complete disregard for his image.

With a sigh he wiped the sweat from his eyes and kneeled up onto his knees. He searched in vain for a clean t-shirt and at last found a sweatshirt that didn’t stink of road and man. His jeans were freshly laundered from the day before last, so he would wear them again. But if there was anything the horrors of gym class had taught him, it was the importance of clean underwear.

Once dressed, Exitus gathered his toothbrush and battered old razor, a bar of Irish Springs and shoved his supplies into the pouch of the sweatshirt. He shimmied through his homemade partition and eased into the front cab of Genevieve, bid hello and good morning to his beloved vehicle and the morose Laka.

“’Good morning’?” she asked through her evil eyes. “What’s so good about it?”

Exitus gave the hula girl an “Oh, you” grin, then dug into his pants pocket for his wallet—which was getting to be far more brown than it was green. He would have to start looking for work soon, there was no way around it. First, however, was a clean-up and a decent breakfast.

“If they have snakes and snails and puppy dog tails, Laka, I’ll bring some back to you.”

“How considerate.”

“I know. Aren’t I a real prince?”

He pocketed his wallet and slid over into the driver’s seat. Opening the door, he stepped out into a perfect fall morning. The air was stark and cold, but still held a minute amount of warmth to it alongside the dampness from the evening storm. The sun was also still rising in the sky, battling against the night to return color to the world. Brilliant hues of yellow and orange pushed against black, staining it a steely grey.

Gingerly slamming the door behind him, Exitus hiked through the mud to the diner’s easy-to-ascend wooden stairs—his shoes sucking and smacking all along the way. He grimaced down at his feet, at his thrift store, name brand boots now unrecognizable; they were filthy with wet dirt and rain debris. He tried to scrape them off as best he could on the bottom step before proceeding up the rest, though they were still saturated enough to thunk! heavily against the treads. If he tracked mud throughout the diner, at least it would give the poor waitress something to do—that and stare at him strangely when he asked for permission to use the bathroom as a shower (manners had been beaten into him as deeply as the cuddly fat encasing him).

Exitus looked to make sure the “ALWAYS OPEN” sign was still in the window and turned the door handle, opened it to the Dead Fall day.

Quiet met Exitus as he walked into the diner. Horror greeted him when he lifted his head from his shoes.

The door nearly broke Exitus’s nose as he scrambled to get back through it, collided into his shoulder and banged against his elbow. He hurled himself against the railing of the stairs, his gut folding into the wood as Exitus heaved himself over to vomit into the rhododendrons.